


the reasons that i need you

by underherspell



Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Study, Cooking, F/M, Fluff and Angst, Sad Solas (Dragon Age), Skyhold (Dragon Age), Unreliable Narrator, food as a metaphor, melancholic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:09:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,135
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27171568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/underherspell/pseuds/underherspell
Summary: There's no time for conceptualities in their tiny formidable bubble of existence.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15





	the reasons that i need you

**Author's Note:**

> the idea for this came to me while i was folding samosa with my grandma last ramadan and it hasn't left since. lavellan IS making samosa in this, and it IS a dalish food, because i said so. (for those who don't know, samosas are a type of south asian snack. the filling used usually differs from culture to culture but the pakistani way is to use either potato filling or beef filling. obviously i had to change some things in order to make it more ~elfy~ but it's the same idea. yes this is disgustingly self indulgent.) 
> 
> anywho. this is best read while listening to nichole by flower face. enjoy.

It’s bright outside as Solas aimlessly wanders the halls of Skyhold. It is strange, he thinks, that on this dull tangerine afternoon, he finds himself quite literally _aimless_ . He has no goal nor destination in mind and it irritates him a bit, actually – there is always _something_ to do, _somewhere_ to go, _someone_ to help, never a dull day with the Inquisition – until today. It is surprisingly calm. The peace is foreign to him, but Solas finds himself welcoming it, thinks it feels quite like the ocean after a storm ( or the calm before one, but he embraces it regardless. )

The silence of the castle threads tightly together with the swirls of his thoughts, stepping between shadow and patches of sunlight, putting a hand out to feel the warmth. It is not every day that he gets to enjoy life like this, like appreciating how the sun feels on his skin or how the ground feels beneath his feet. Then he remembers that to many people, this is what day to day life looks like; with sun and earth and fresh air as more than mere acquaintances. Maybe a low chuckle escapes him because he can’t recall how long he’s been alive but days like this are still a bit strange to him, just like water and skin and human contact and the taste of food on his tongue. For a split second he feels about as old as he looks.

A bend in the corridor takes Solas down a couple steps and then– Lavellan.

She stands with her back to him, and some part of him sensed her presence there before he even saw her. He realizes they are in the kitchens.

She fumbles with something on the table, still unaware of him leaning on the doorframe behind her – or if she is aware, she doesn’t show it. Solas drowns in empathy for a moment, the wicked eyes she cannot see; he could stand there and stare at her back until he shattered her bones, or turned her to the same stone that made up Skyhold’s walls. If she knew this, would she still kiss him the same? ( Knowing Lavellan, the probable answer is yes. Somehow that hurts more than the alternative. )

He briefly considers leaving but he doesn’t, because he is many things, and a selfish man is among them.

“Vhenan,” he finally speaks. When she doesn’t startle it is either because she did not hear him, or because she’s been aware of him from the start. When she doesn’t acknowledge him even as he rounds the table to stand opposite her, it is either because she’s so utterly focused on her task that the world around her has momentarily ceased to exist, or because she knows he is there and she chooses to remain silent, but Solas already knows it’s the latter. Sneaking up on the Inquisitor isn’t an easily achieved feat, he’s come to realize.

And he does not disturb her, perfectly content to stand and watch her deft fingers work.

To what she was working on he didn’t pay much mind until now, but to his wonderment, Inquisitor Lavellan appeared to be cooking. On a wooden chopping board lay a cluster of little triangular shapes – items of food, no doubt, made with some kind of thin leaf. He can’t be quite sure. For all intents and purposes, Solas is knowledgeable in a great deal of subjects. Food, however, was never something he felt himself inclined to learn more about.

So he asks, “What do you prepare, vhenan?” while his eyes travel the table and find three things: a bowl, containing a mixture of spiced peas and potato. A small stack of parchment-thin leaves, opaque when put together but translucent individually, a type of foliage he does not recognize. Lastly, a saucer holding a cup of tea long gone cold.

The hum she gives is contemplative. “A type of Dalish comfort food. It was popular within my clan.”

He thinks hard, sifting through all his years of knowledge for anything relating to Dalish cuisine, and comes up short. “My familiarity with things pertaining to Dalish culture is rather limited. I hope you will forgive my ignorance.”

  
  


And then Lavellan looks up at him for the first time, with a twinkle of mischief in her eyes that makes his fingers twitch behind his back. “I must say, Solas, it gives me great pleasure to hear _you_ admit that.”

The smile he gives is cautious at her abstruseness when he asks her what she means. She rests her elbows on the table and leans forward to tell him:

“What I mean is, I am always the one wanting to know what you know. You have a lot to give, and I am grateful for it. But now that you are admitting there is something about which _you_ lack knowledge, I feel the need to tease you. Forgive me.”

Her grin is contagious. Solas puffs out a laugh suddenly, almost as if he hadn’t meant for it to come out, but it broke free regardless. Lavellan stares at her tea, and he stares at Lavellan staring at her tea, after a good minute of cringing subtly at the table – or the space that the table occupies – and catches her smiling to herself. He thinks _she_ is the one with a lot to give.

There is a sad distance between them. She doesn’t know it yet so he tries to ignore it, but it will always be there, even if he momentarily forgets. And her barely touched cup of tea is also in the middle of their distance, stirred by a breeze from an open window and probably Lavellan’s eyes.

“Come, let me show you.”

He comes around to stand beside her, paying special attention to the way she wets her lips and tucks her hair behind her ear before she gently pulls a new leaf from the stack and begins anew. 

The first thing she does is cut the leaf down the middle, making two halves closer to a rectangular shape rather than one large square, and sets one half aside. Then she places a small amount of the potato mixture on one end of the leaf, and folds diagonally upwards, and then again, and again, until it forms a pocket into which she stuffs more mixture. She continues folding and seals it with milk, and Solas swears he’s never seen something so intricate.

“Might you show me again?” He asks, if only to see her fingers move like that once more. Her smile grows. She looks back down at the chopping board and tucks her hair behind her ears again ( with her wrists now, to avoid getting food anywhere it doesn’t need to be. )

This time, Lavellan talks to him while she works. “You are probably thinking that it’s a strange thing for me to make food in the middle of everything going on, but…” The folding seizes her attention for a moment, and she trails off while Solas watches her seal a tear in the leaf with a drop of milk, before she continues. “Well, today is a quiet day. We haven’t had one of those in a while, and it’s a nice change of pace, truly. But it left room for me to feel a bit homesick.” She seals the final fold and places the perfect little triangle in the pile with the rest. “And so here we are!” A small laugh falls past her lips. Suddenly Solas cannot fathom a world in which he doesn’t wake up every morning to the sun warming his skin, in which he doesn’t hear Lavellan’s laugh and see her smile and _love her_ and _be loved_ in return _._ Things like Breaches and Orbs and Corypheus and being _Fen’harel_ all seem so distant. He is treading in dangerous, dangerous territory. He wants to stay here forever.

Everything inside him screams at him to leave, to stop subjecting her to a hell she doesn’t even know she’s in, but they are there, standing in that kitchen. He consciously refuses to go. Not when the sun has just begun to set, casting a warm apricot glow on the entire room. Where there once was chamomile, there is now amber bathing the Inquisitor’s face, and she is too beautiful for him to turn away now.

“I am sorry you are so far from your people, I am acquainted with the struggle.” _Too much. Too close._ “You have been thrown into this world of corruption, politics and war, and you have handled it admirably thus far, as I have no doubt you will continue to do. But I know it gets hard. What I am trying to say is, should you ever need anyone, I am here for you, vhenan.”

She blinks slowly, stunned into silence. Part of him wishes she would beat him, scream at him and tell him that he misread their entire relationship, that he was merely ever a body to warm her bed, if only so that he could stop making promises he knows he cannot keep.

“You don’t know how much I appreciate that,” she quietly says instead, “thank you, ma vhenan.”

They stand for a moment, each drinking in the other’s presence, knowing that time is sacred and tomorrow will breed another disaster. Lavellan is smiling brightly at the table. Solas clenches his fists behind his back. The smile is not one of malice, he is aware. Nor is it of mischief or mockery, and it’s also not the type that makes people wish they knew what was going on inside one’s head ( even though Solas _always_ wants to know what’s going on inside Lavellan’s head. ) It is a contented smile, but behind it is a look of deep thought, and then he knows she is thinking about something she isn’t supposed to think about.

He also knows she will not say anything to him. There’s no time for conceptualities in their tiny formidable bubble of existence and time is precisely what always crawls out of his fingers ostentatiously, flickering in and out of realness. Solas wants to break it in half.

Partly to stifle her deliberation, partly because he actually wants to learn, he points at the chopping board and asks, “may I try making one?”

“Yes, of course!” Her delight is evident, but he can still detect her discontent hidden between the layers of her tone. He apologizes silently, knowing that one day she will inevitably come to understand why he is the way that he is.

With a small shake of her head, she swiftly halves a leaf and sets one fraction before him. He pushes up the sleeves of his tunic with mock drama, relishing in her soft chuckle. Attempting to recreate the Inquisitor’s little triangular works of art is significantly harder than he expected, the delicate leaf continually ripping in all the most hazardous places and by the time he manages to seal the final fold, he is left with an odd sort of lump sitting in a sad puddle of milk.

“It’s–”

“Pathetic.” He finishes for her. His brow creases as he tries to figure out where he went wrong.

She studies it a moment. “It’s not pathetic. I like it. It has character.”

Solas turns to her, frown firmly in place. She’s still scrutinizing the mess he made. “You only say that to make me feel better. Let me try again.”

“Solas,” she barely contains an eyeroll, “if I thought anything different I would tell you the truth. It does have its flaws, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. To me, it is simply the product of hard work, and that is everything but pathetic.” There is a teasing lilt to her tone, but he can still perceive the authenticity of her words. It makes him smile. She never fails to show her brilliant intellect, even in matters as trivial as Dalish snacks. “Besides,” she continues, “the taste will remain the same.”

He is suddenly struck by something unidentifiable, smile slipping marginally. “Then why do you take special time to fold it so elaborately, if all that matters is how it tastes? Why make the effort to learn and to build if none of it counts in the end?”

Lavellan blinks at him. She has an inkling that they no longer speak solely of food, though the dual meaning is lost on her. She draws a breath, and says, “I never said it doesn’t count. My point is that perfection isn’t a necessity, and sometimes true perfection lies within imperfection. It is given that anyone would do their best to keep their mistakes to a minimum, but I think it’s fruitless to reject the results of our labor simply because they did not turn out the way we desired.”

He grips the edge of the table, looking at her like a deer caught in headlights. She is an earthquake, a forceful one that shakes the very foundation of him, making him second guess every thought he can ever remember having. He desperately wants to tell her that she’s wrong, that all inaccuracies do is break and sometimes they cannot go unrepaired. He scans every inch of her face until he is sure she remains oblivious to the dark and ugly truth of his soul. But could she be completely oblivious when she speaks of the world like that, when her words relate so closely to his predicament? Surely he is only being paranoid.

“I wish you were right, vhenan.” He tells her sadly, digging a splinter of wood from the table into his hand so that he might curb the temptation of allowing himself to believe her. 

There is melancholy in the look she gives him. He can see the gears of her mind working behind her radiant eyes, constantly endeavoring to understand what lies beyond his kind, distant exterior. He knows he’ll never stop feeling guilty for deceiving her so much. He lets go of the splinter in his hand and lets out a breath, allowing an easy smile to pull his lips upward. “Or perhaps you speak the truth. Although if I can credit the deliciousness of my piece to anything, it would be to the stuffing made by your fair hand, rather than the clumsiness of my folding.”

She laughs at his blatant flirting. “I’m sure the abundance of milk you used will contribute a flavor of its own.” But her joking tone is juxtaposed by the remnants of concentrated speculation in her eyes.

As if to hide the fact that his attempt to divert her attention didn’t work, Lavellan suddenly picks up her saucer. He doesn’t have enough time to warn her before she takes a larger than necessary sip of her gross cold tea. She goes deadly still, realizing her misstep only then, before she gulps it down with her eyes screwed shut. She sticks out her tongue and makes a face and Solas laughs at her, attempting to stifle himself only when she playfully pinches his bicep, uncaring that her fingers smear potato on the sleeve of his tunic, but he can’t bring himself to care very much either. It is such a dangerous thing that nothing matters to him when he’s with her – all his plans and his past fade to the back of his mind until there is only her, consuming every single facet of his life. He would be lying if he said he hadn’t genuinely considered forsaking everything, _everything_ just to stay at her side, to build a new life for himself and learn to live with his stupid mistakes, to tell her all he had done and let her be judge, jury and executioner.

But the pain is one thing he never forgets. It is useful in pulling him away from such abstract ideas, a constant reminder that the single way to atone for his misdeeds is to set them right no matter the cost, and only when his soul turns as grey as the winter sky, when Lavellan spits on the memory of him, when happiness is so far away that it seems a lost cause to try to attain it, can he begin to think about picking up the pieces. When he no longer has the will to. It is a cruel self-punishment, but a necessary one. The Din’anshiral does not allow for people like him to find euphoria in the smiles of people like Lavellan, even though his love for her is vast and eternal, palpable in the way it manifests itself in the tremble of his heart and the softness of his touch.

He’s clutching splinters again until he’s broken out of his painful trance of not falling further in love with her. He’s getting nervous, maybe, and concerned, definitely.

Solas turns to her abruptly, letting the splinter fall, and he looks at her. Simply looks, memorizes the angles of her face and the curve of her lips. He documents everything about her in this moment, because when the day comes where he wanders alone again, he knows he will want to remember today. He’ll want to remember her laugh and her humor and her wit, and he’ll want her to remember this too, in the highest hopes that despite what he has to do, she will not think him a monster.

So he brings his hand up to caress her cheek, fingers lightly tracing the lines of her vallaslin, seeking and finding everything he didn’t know he needed in the depths of her eyes. There’s a sorrowful understanding there, like she is trying to tell him: _I don’t know the things you have done, or the things that have been done to you, and I will likely never truly know. But should you wish to tell me one day, I will be waiting, and it will be impossible for me to love you less._

She doesn’t wait for him to kiss her first. Her lips come up to touch against his, and then he is pulling her tightly to him while his tongue traces the bow of her upper lip. He tastes tea on her tongue when she touches his own, warmed by the heat of her mouth. He hates the flavor infinitely less when it is coming from within her.

He doesn’t deserve a single drop of her love. The way she kisses him makes him instantly overflow with unidentifiable emotion and belief in things that can never be. But for just a second, he allows himself to smile. He’s full of affection even if he’s devoid of something else, and he’s bright with the life she gives him, little specks of life and Lavellan, Lavellan, Lavellan.

He is only ever whole when she is there with him.


End file.
